Shocked, he leaned back again. “No. That is not how it is. I don’t want it to be like this, and if it truly appears this way, then it needs to be changed. There’s more to your life than just me, and there must be, too. You cannot give up everything else and devote your entire existence to me, Naomi.”
Instantly he saw he had hurt her. He could not fathom how, but by trying to give back her independence, he had wounded her.
“And anyway, what about your family? You never told me you had all this responsibility waiting for you. You tell me you have barely enough money to pay for Joshua’s education when in reality you have this enormous hotel empire in the family, and you are the heir!”
She wandered away to the deck door, this time opening it to let in the fresh afternoon breeze.
“Is this the reason why you returned early?” Her voice was brittle. “To blame me for not giving Joshua a proper schooling, or not making enough money, or not pursuing a career like you do? Suddenly I’m no longer good enough for you? Is that was this is all about?”
“For God’s sake!” Jon jumped up and came over to her in three strides, grabbing her by the arm and turning her around. “This is utterly insane! You know that’s not true. You know I never meant it like that! You can’t center your whole life on me, you can’t! There is so much more for you to do, Naomi. I’m only a man, for crying out loud. I’m not the center of the universe.”
Her head was bowed, her body limp in his hard grip, and he heard soft sobs from her. Bewildered and helpless by the scene that had developed, Jon found no more words to say. Ever so slowly, as if she were coming up from deep water, Naomi raised her eyes to him.
“But you are. I can’t help it, Jon. Everything else…nothing else…” A little shrug of her shoulder. “You. Forever. Even when I ran, all through the lonely years, it was only you. If this is not what you want, then I’m sorry. I never touched any of that money because I never felt I deserved it. I left my family to follow you, and I broke off my studies because being with you was more important to me. Anyway, I never meant to step into the family business. This, the Seaside, was quite sufficient for me. It was my sanctuary, my retreat from life. I needed it, here I could heal and lead a small and safe existence.”
Her hand came up to rest on his chest. “I shed my life like a coat I didn’t need any more once you kissed me that day by the lake. I shed it there in Geneva, and I never picked it up again.”
“But, you silly girl…” It was a half-hearted attempt at reason; he knew there was no way he could argue with her single-minded logic. It was her own and just as convoluted as always, ending up in decisions that seemed like bombs dropped from high above directly on his head.
“But it makes me feel bad. I’ve taken so much away from you. Will you at least play some Rachmaninoff for me now? Will you let me hear? The rest we can talk about later.”
Her straight, slim back and curving waist were a pleasing sight as she sat down in the place that had become his over the months. He had never wondered why a Steinway grand stood in the center of her living space, assuming it had been there waiting for him, put in that exact space for him to show up and take over.
But the thing that really blew his mind was the mastery she had over the difficult piece. She was no Horowitz, that much was true, but good enough for a concert hall any time. His own playing was not nearly that sophisticated. The few lessons he had taken when he was young had never taken him even close to a classical education. He could just imagine her as a little girl in braids and a lovely rose-colored dress with a bow in the back, gazing seriously at her piano teacher as he explained the music to her in her parents’ large apartment overlooking the lake and the promenade.
The music ended. Naomi rested her hands on her thighs and waited with bowed head for his comment.
“Come,” Jon said, “Come with me now, and let me love you. Come.”
Much later, after Naomi had called the kitchen and asked Andrea to send down some dinner, they sat amid the rumpled sheets, and while she fed Jon pieces of chicken she narrated the tale of her family.
Originally, she told him, her ancestors had come from Denmark, like so many settlers in Norway, and had developed holdings in the beautiful Gudbrandsdal that stretched from Lillehammer to the north. They had been landowners and farmers and later in the retinue of the king, and had therefore often traveled to Trondheim, the old seat of the monarchy. Because of this, the family had owned property all over Norway.
Jon asked when this might have been, and caught his breath at her staggering reply, delivered so off-handedly: sometime in the thirteenth century. He could hardly believe anyone could trace their ancestry back that far.
The family had spread out, she continued, oblivious to his astonishment, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some of the first settlers in Canada and on the American East Coast to establish hotels there. Somehow they had succeeded in their enterprises, and they held a group of hotels, nice, traditional houses with the charm of centuries and history.
Now it had come down to this: her father and his brother owned the company, and she and her uncle’s son were the heirs, but she did not want a part in it, having chosen to go in a different direction. Her musical education had been meant as a reprieve, a chance to follow her own interests, before she entered business school and consequently the family business. But then—she shrugged her shoulder negligently—Jon had appeared in Geneva, and everything had changed.
And he had given her nothing, nothing at all. He had taken her with him to LA and installed her in his house and enjoyed her company, drawing solace and strength from her presence and taking all the love he could get, and had believed, in his incredible self-absorption, that life for her was just as wonderful as it had been for him. As bitter as it felt, he had to admit it was nothing better than trailing in his wake indeed.
“And now,” he asked softly, “and now you consent to marry me, and you are ready to give up everything once more? What of this empire waiting for you, and the possibility to do something wonderful? What about your music?”
He received no answer, only the small shake of her head and the growing reticence.
“No wonder your father hates me so much. He wants you for different things, and here you are, throwing away your life for a useless man like me. I understand a lot better now. God, how that must have pissed him off when you returned from California, pregnant, heart-broken, and lonely. Now I understand why he was so very unfriendly when I tried to find you.” He nodded in slow comprehension. “I ruined you. I plucked their beautiful, budding rose, the hope of the family and the future of their business, the talented, sweet girl they were grooming to take over some day, and then tossed her back when I was done. Or so it must have seemed to them. God, will they ever forgive me?”
The thought frightened him, and the knowledge that he would have to face her disenchanted family in a few days when he would stand before the altar to finally set right what should have been done years ago. Naomi did not react to this insight. He watched her toy with a small tomato, then lay it aside again.
“In their eyes, you are doing the wrong thing,” Jon said. “They thought they finally had you back on track, managing the hotel rather successfully, your son raised and you healed. And now, just as your father and uncle think they see the light at the end of the tunnel, you let your deep, dark secret slip to Joshua and take the risk that he will try to contact me.”
He shifted in growing excitement. “How devious you are, Naomi. You did this just when you knew responsibility would descend on you in the form of a hotel empire, and so you flew away again. You are truly the master of running, my dear.”
From the bed between them, he began to remove the dishes and the tray she had placed there and set them on the floor.
“But here the running ends. I don’t care why you run from your family or why you don’t want your heritage, but I do care a lot about your running from me. I’ll do what I have to do to drive it out of y
ou for good, and I’ll work on it studiously. You need such a lot of assurance, and I’m willing to give it. If feeling my love for you is what you need, then you’ll get it.”
The days unfolded like flowers on a slow-blooming tree, one by one, each bringing something new and surprising.
Jon moved into the studio. When Naomi asked him what he planned to do up there, he replied, “Read a book. I haven’t done that for the longest time.”
He treated her with exquisite courtesy, never once entering her rooms without her explicit invitation and then never trying to touch her. They spent many hours together each day, taking their meals, walking along the bay, driving through the countryside. They even went to Bergen to visit the old, brightly painted Hanse buildings along the harbor.
Jon bought some more fanciful Norwegian sweaters. With a pained expression, he told her he wished he had owned something that warm when he made his torturous way from one recording studio to the next at the beginning of his career in the nasty New Yorker winter of his twenty-first year.
“You laugh,” he said darkly, “but it was a really bitter winter, and I had to walk a lot because I couldn’t afford the subway. You have no idea how the cold wind howls through the canyons of Manhattan.”
Once again, they had lunch at the fish market, sitting at the long wooden table and eating off newspaper, and again the air was tart, only this time the breeze carried the first brown leaves with it and tossed them across the cobblestones of the open space. Triumphantly Jon brought out one of his new sweaters and wrapped it around her when she shivered, and then left his arm around her shoulder. She leaned against him, her coffee cup between her hands to warm them, and listened as he told her how he had struggled to get someone, anyone, in the music business to listen to his songs.
“You must have been very thin,” Naomi remarked, as she fed him another crab.
Like a circle, their talk returned again and again to the subject of writing and how different it was for them, how they often had the same sentiments but found such different ways to express them. It seemed to Jon as if they were trying to unravel the mystery of creativity altogether, as if in finding the source and the mechanism of it, the workings would become easier.
Naomi shrugged often. “Just write,” she would say. “Don’t think so much. Shut up, listen, write. It’s that easy.”
He did not believe it for a moment.
She played for him. Her choice of music astounded him; no Chopin or Bach for Naomi, it had to be the difficult, intricate pieces of the late Romantics. Debussy and Ravel in addition to Rachmaninoff, and many pieces for four hands. He wondered how hard and how often she must have practiced over the years to master them, and whether Joshua had been her partner.
“You scare me,” he told her one afternoon. “I would never attempt to play these. They are meant for a concert hall, not your living room. And you play them for your own amusement. Scary.”
He received a bemused glance in reply, and another of her simple statements that astounded him.
“I like them. Never cared for Chopin, too boring.”
So he took one of the Gymnopedie pieces by Satie, put it on the piano, and asked her to play with him.
They sat side by side on the piano bench, and he stumbled through the complicated harmonies while Naomi’s fingers moved with graceful dexterity over the keys, easily catching the melancholy of the melody.
She was a good teacher, patient, and with the single-minded belief that he could do what she had mastered, telling him over and over that it was nothing, only technique, and he, musician that he was, just needed to put his mind to it. Imagine, she said, if you had no band to accompany your songs, only the piano, and went on to tell him rhat his own harmonies were not that much simpler, only he gave them away to let the others play instead of doing it himself.
Naomi’s eyes twinkled at him wickedly, “But you thought the melodies up. So you know the chords. You are just too lazy to play them yourself.”
Solveigh returned a week before the wedding date.
She was by herself, no Russ in tow, and for a moment Naomi felt a spark of anxiety for her friend, but it was dispelled easily.
Solveigh waved her anxious question away. “No trouble. They’re still so busy with the soundtrack, and I didn’t want to wait any longer to get back. I’m sure you’re floundering here and need me to take things in hand.”
She set down her purse on the counter and looked around.
“God, I love the jet-set life. I think they invented it for me. Oh, good, the coffee is ready.”
It seemed to Naomi it had needed no more than that for life to pick up speed once more. While Christi was still pouring the coffee, Solveigh had her notebook open on the table and was discussing last-minute arrangements with Andrea, the room list for the guests and the menu for the following days, flowers for the tables and the lobby.
Helen, Sal, and Joshua showed up a day later, closely followed by her parents.
Naomi had not seen them since the day Jon had brought them to Halmar, and she greeted them with trepidation. Her father was friendly enough, even a little amused at her shamefaced hesitation.
“Perk up,” he said. “We won’t tear his head off. It’s done. He’s a good enough man, and there can be no doubting his devotion.”
The band and the rest from California arrived next.
Helen leaned on the countertop next to Naomi. “They haven’t changed at all. They pass through town every so often, and crowd my house for an afternoon or evening, and it’s always so much fun. He is lucky to have a bunch of people who stick with him like that.” She paused thoughtfully. “He is lucky. He has had the luck of the devil his whole life.”
“There are drawbacks,” Naomi replied softly. “He has paid dearly for his success.”
That remark earned her a derisive snort from Helen.
After the band had been shown to their rooms and the lobby had emptied once more, Sal approached her with a folder and asked her to step outside for a moment where they would not be overheard.
He had managed to buy the house for her, but it had not come cheaply, and renovations would cost quite a tidy sum. All in all, though, he was rather pleased with the purchase, a good value and a solid structure.
“I’m scared,” she said, “It’s so final. We aren’t teenagers anymore, and we should know what we are doing. We should be able to make sane decisions, but there is no sanity here, there can’t be, and in all honesty I think I’m doing this against my better judgment. It’s not the most sensible thing, but it seems the only one possible. It’s a one-way road, for better or worse, and we’re on it at top speed.” Pushing her hair out of her eyes, she squinted against the sun. “And here we are again, Sal, you having to endure listening to me. You must hate me by now, all the trash I keep throwing at you. It is selfish of me, and not very nice to you. I’m sorry.”
With a little smile, he shook his head. “Nah. It’s okay. I can take quite a lot, and I want to see you happy.”
From the mouth of the bay the mail ship made its way into the harbor. Sal watched in fascination as the tall black side of the vessel moved ever closer to the hotel until it cast its shadow onto the deck outside Naomi’s apartment and even over the glass front of the restaurant, and then started its turning maneuver right by the quay wall.
Olaf stepped out and stopped beside them, looking toward the ship expectantly. His brother, he informed Sal, and the family from Toronto would be aboard. They loved to travel the slow way when they came to Halmar, flying into Bergen and then taking the trip on the Hurtigruten ship. He waved to a group of people on the deck.
The wind was brisk and unfriendly, bringing a tart bite from the mountains in the east with it, high up where winter was already taking over, and it ripped right through Naomi’s cotton blouse. She shivered, put her arms around herself, and was on the point of returning inside when a taxi drew up in front of the entrance.
For Naomi, it seemed that time stood still fo
r an instant, as if the air around her had suddenly thickened into transparent stone, making it impossible for her to move, or breathe, or speak, or even close her eyes.
It was the woman from the film premiere, Sophie, getting out of the car. Her red hair in a neat ponytail, a warm jacket buttoned up under her chin, she looked directly at Naomi and Sal, her face set in a serious, rigid mask.
Naomi felt Sal’s hand grip her upper arm hard and tug at her, but she stood very still, afraid any move she made would cause a course of events to be set in motion that she would not be able to control.
Sophie came right up to her, no hesitation in her steps. “It’s you, isn’t it? You look different, older. Well, you can’t have him. He’s not yours, hasn’t been for the longest time. I don’t know what you did to get him back, but you need to let him go. He belongs with me, was with me until your son showed up. You have no right to him.”
Her throat dry with panic, blood pounding in her ears, Naomi tried to answer, but Sal was quicker.
“Sophie.” His voice did not sound like him at all, but kinder, sadder, gentler. “What are you doing here? Please leave, darling. You need to leave before he sees you.”
Naomi watched as tears welled up in Sophie’s eyes.
“Sal. You know how close we were. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why she has such a hold on him. But Sal, please. Let me talk to Jon. Please.”
There was a moment during which none of them said a word. From behind, Naomi could hear her father’s voice and her uncle’s deep laughter, and she tried to free herself from Sal’s hand, but he would not let her go.
The Distant Shore (Stone Trilogy) Page 21