The Distant Shore (Stone Trilogy)

by Mariam Kobras

  “Sophie,” he said. “You must leave now. There is nothing for you here. Jon is getting married in a few days. He has told you that. I know he spoke to you in LA. For God’s sake, go home! I assure you, you don’t want to be here, it is not a good idea at all.”

  Instead of leaving, Sophie looked at Naomi, her fists balled at her sides.

  She was a pretty, slender girl in her mid-twenties, skin clear and transparent in the way it often was with red-heads. She had lovely blue eyes. Naomi could well imagine her appeal to Jon, lively and frail-boned as she was.

  “I can’t let him go,” she was saying in a broken voice. “I can’t just give him up. I love him. God, I love him. And I know he loves me. He can’t just stop loving me one day. Please, don’t insist on this madness. I know he thinks he has to do this because of his son, but you could set him free. It’s not too late. Please tell him he is free to make his choice, and you will see, he will come back to me. He said he was only with you because he felt it was his duty. Only his decency made him come here. LA is his home! You can’t keep him in this frozen wasteland. He’s a star, he needs to shine!”

  Sal felt Naomi shrink against him, her body trembling. Her father had come up to them and stopped; her uncle, a tall, white-haired man with broad shoulders and a huge frame stood beside him. Sophie, oblivious to the attention she was getting, went on: “I know it, I’m sure of it. The way he used to hold me and make love me, talking to me until I wanted to die with longing. I know he loves me.” She was crying hard, her words coming out between bitter sobs. “He can’t love you. All those stupid photos of you in his house, they were just him being obsessive. They meant nothing. Right up to the moment your son broke into our lives, he was with me, even the evening before he left to come here. You are too old for him! All the girls Jon dated, they were all younger than you!”

  With a quick movement Sal pulled Naomi into his arms and held her tight against him when he felt her knees begin to buckle.

  “Leave, Sophie,” he ordered. “You know he does as he pleases. There has never been another love in his life, and I know, believe me. All of you were only passing through. Jon would never have married any of you, he had always waited for her to return. Go.” And, more vehemently: “This is such a senseless stunt! You should have known better than to come here!”

  Olaf and Carl watched the drama, listening to Sal with embarrassed fascination. There was movement in the lobby, laughter, a voice that they all recognized instantly.

  Jon stepped outside and into a scene he thought had surely been dredged up from the darkest corner of the realm where nightmares were forged, custom-made for terrible sinners and hopeless losers. His heart froze at what he was witnessing, and his first, incongruous thought was that he was relieved his mother was not around to see.

  His future father-in-law and his brother, speechless and astounded; Sophie—he had no idea where she had appeared from—in hysterical tears, facing Sal, who held Naomi close to his chest. Naomi herself was as white as a ghost, rigid with shock and quite unable to stand on her own, her hands clamped tightly onto Sal’s sleeves.

  A flood of relief washed over Sal’s face. “There, Baby Girl,” he whispered to Naomi. “He’s here now. It will all be over in a minute.”

  There was no reaction from her.

  “Sophie,” Jon said.

  She looked at him, wiping her face with trembling fingers. “Jon, my love, I’ve come to talk some sense into you. You need to come home, darling. You can’t be serious about this thing here! She can’t mean that much to you, it’s only because of the kid, right? You should have given me the chance to have your baby, but you never wanted it. You never wanted any commitment. The young, dumb thing, never too demanding but good enough to entertain you.”

  It was Olaf who stepped forward and pried Naomi from Sal with gentle force and led her away into the house, followed slowly by a bewildered Carl and his family. Jon tried to turn and follow her, but Sal held him back.

  “Later. Give her time to calm down. Finish this now, Jon. Create clarity.”

  There is a kind of exhaustion that comes with extreme emotional upheaval, a leaden, speechless kind of tiredness which makes thinking impossible and saying the right thing an unbearable chore. It was this he felt now, facing Sophie, Sal standing a step behind him as if in support.

  “I’m sorry,” Jon said. “I’m truly sorry, Sophie. I thought I made myself clear and that you understood. She has always been my deepest desire. For all those years, my thoughts always returned to her, and I would rather not live at all than live without her. She’s the one true love of my life, son or not. My son, our son, changes nothing. I would still be here, or wherever Naomi chose to be.” He drew a painful, ragged breath. “I’m sorry there has to be a scene like this. I never loved any other woman the way I love her. Nobody. And yes…” Bitter, hard words, but for Jon it was the truth: “You passed my time, that was all.”

  Sophie shook her head as he spoke, still crying.

  “Please forget me, Sophie, I beg you. Our time together was fun, but it’s over. There’s nothing else to say. Please, please leave.”

  He tried to reach for her and lead her back toward the waiting taxi, but she drew back.

  “You’re just throwing me away like a piece of dirt, aren’t you, Jon? It meant nothing to you. It doesn’t hurt you one little bit that you’re killing me like this?”

  “You won’t die, Sophie.” A rueful smile crossed his face. “Trust me, you won’t. I know. It will hurt for a while, and then you will meet someone else. Let it go. Let me put you in the taxi.”

  But she shook her head at him. “Norway doesn’t belong to you yet, Jonathan Stone. I can stand where I please. You can’t just send me off like one of your servants.”

  “Well, if that’s what you want, go ahead. But I’m telling you, you’re only hurting yourself. Go home, Sophie.”

  With that, he moved toward the door and the quiet lobby. Sal followed, certain that this confrontation was not over yet. He was proven right with Sophie’s next words, called out to them from where she still stood in the street.

  “You fool! You obsessive selfish fool! I know how to deal with you, but how long will your old flame put up with your moods, I ask you? You’ll come back to me, you’ll see! I’ll make you come back!”

  Sal felt a sudden shift in Jon’s movement and gripped his shoulder hard. “No. Don’t. Nothing good will come of it. There are more important things right now. You only have a few days left to set matters right, and I think you will need every minute.”

  “Her father, Sophie’s father…” Jon said, a trace of uncertainty in his voice, but Sal shook his head.

  “Don’t worry about that. He’s a sensible man. Go to Naomi, Jon. I’ll take care of Sophie.”

  Jon stood in front of her door, dumbfounded by what was happening, knocking again and again without receiving an answer.

  “Open up,” he demanded. “Right now, Naomi. Open up and let me in. I’m done with your running. If there’s something you have to say to me, do it, damn it. Don’t hide behind this door and your family.”

  For the longest time there was no response.

  Just when he had raised his fist to hammer on the wood once more, she opened it, and he realized it had never been locked. He felt like a fool.

  Naomi went and stood beside her desk, about to pick up some papers, and he made himself walk in. She seemed composed enough although she was very pale and her hands were shaking.

  He could see she had been crying, hard, her eyes still ringed with dark smudges, but she refused to let him get a good look at her face, fiddling with the papers instead.

  “Your lyrics. What are you doing, Love?”

  She did not reply, but went out on the deck and tossed them into the water, where they immediately drifted away on the choppy waves.

  “Are you mad? What are you doing?” Jon shouted as he dragged her back inside, slamming the glass door behind him with a shuddering sound.
She did not fight him, but once he let go of her she silently picked up more of the pages and tore them into little pieces. Outside he had stopped her, but now there was nothing he could do but watch in abject horror as the song lyrics he valued so highly were destroyed.

  “No, no more!” He tried to reach for her but she pulled back from him. “Stop right now. What’s gotten into you? You wrote those for me, and I won’t let you destroy them. Stop now, Naomi.”

  “They’re mine,” she whispered. “And I can do with them as I please. I don’t want them anymore. And I don’t want you, either.”

  This time he did not stand by as she attempted to rip up another page. He took it from her and picked up what remained of the once thick stack.

  “For God’s sake, this is insane. You can’t just throw away your work like that. You have tossed out a fortune, not to speak of the personal value, Naomi. You are throwing away years of your life, and for what? I don’t even know why this is happening!”

  “Go away,” Naomi said in a very still, small voice. “I can’t take it anymore. I tried to be tough about it, but I can’t. Go away.”

  She was far away, turned inward in the withdrawn, quiet way he hated and feared.

  “I’m not going away. Your family and mine are up there waiting to celebrate with us, and we need to have this out now, and be done with it. And why, for God’s sake, this dramatic number with the lyrics? You are making me cry.”

  He tried to touch her, but she flinched from him, knocking into the glass pane behind her in a panicked attempt to avoid him. Jon stared at her in shock. He felt like his blood had stopped, freezing into painful, biting crystals in his limbs and heart and lungs. She had never done this before, retreated from him in such a final, frightened manner, and the thought flashed through his mind that in all his life there had never been a moment more terrible, more awful, than seeing Naomi leaning into the window, her arms wrapped tightly around her waist, tears slipping down her face, rejecting him.

  “Naomi.”

  “Go,” she sobbed. “Go, Jon. I can’t!”

  “No! I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what happened. I step out to have a cigarette, and I find you in Sal’s arms, fainting with terror, and Sophie, and your father, for God’s sake. There’s not a single image I could dream up that would be worse than that, and I don’t know what is making you go to pieces this way and destroy—” he held up the pitiful remaining lyrics—“destroy what took you sixteen years to write!”

  He laid the sheets on the piano and went to pry her out of her corner.

  Again she recoiled, and it was nearly more than he could take to see the fear in her eyes.

  “What? My God, Naomi, what happened? What did she say to you? Why are you rejecting me like this? You’re breaking my heart; you’re scaring me to death! I love you, I’m desperate, and I want to know!”

  She only shook her head.

  “What? I need to know, Naomi, I can’t fathom what I might have done to hurt you so.”

  The most incomprehensible answer came from her, one he could not deal with at all, an echo of words spoken before.

  “Nothing.” Said in the same still, deadly voice.

  Naomi stood before him like a small wild animal he had hunted and brought down, helpless and waiting for the final blow, silent and hardly breathing. He wanted to hold her and take the pain from her, but by now he was too scared to reach out again, knowing he would not be able to live through one more of her flights.

  So he held out his hand. “Naomi. Baby, please. Please, I beg you.”

  And just when he thought there could not be a more devastating statement from her, she said, “Don’t touch me, Jon. Don’t touch me.”

  A deep, sad silence settled over them, Jon trying to digest her bitter rejection, Naomi barely holding herself together. He sat down on the couch and drew a couple of breaths to calm himself and regain some small measure of composure. He was aware that their families and friends were gathering even now in the lobby and dining room, filling the hotel with the laughter and happy spirit of a wedding that had been so long in coming it seemed to most of them like the final chapter of an improbable fairy tale.

  “Are you breaking up with me? What did I do? You are not even giving me the chance to set it right. You are pushing me aside, and you don’t even tell me why? You throw away the love you held for me all through those long years, you toss your lyrics into the bay, and now you stand here in front of me and tell me I did nothing?”

  She toyed with the few crumbled sheets on the piano as if she were thinking of destroying them too.

  “Come and sit with me, at least,” Jon begged. “I promise not to touch you, if that is your wish. But God, Naomi! Not even the comfort of an embrace? Not even a kiss? I know I would feel a lot better if I had my arms around you.”

  She did not react, almost as if it did not concern her at all.

  “You are seriously leaving me. You want me to leave you. A few days before our wedding, and you want us to part? And then what? A couple of years from now, will you once again come to a concert and cry your heart out when I sing ‘Secret Garden’? How do you suppose we will go on living if we part now? I know there won’t be a life for me anymore. I might as well jump into the bay now and be done with it.” Bitterness had crept into his voice, and the fatigue of a struggle lost.

  “Well, if that’s what you truly want, then I’ll have to take it,” Jon said, rising from the couch again. “No explanation, no solace, no love, not even shouting and fighting, which I could live with, because at least you would be talking to me. But this, Naomi? Silence and destruction, and no chance to atone? You’re killing me.”

  He walked to the door and stood, knob in hand, waiting for her to call him back, explain her devastating behavior, but she remained silent.

  “I’m not giving up.” Once said, the words seemed to return his strength to him.

  “I refuse to give up. We managed to love each other through half a lifetime, you in your exile, me in ignorance about what had happened to us, and I’ll be damned if I let this happen again. You are not going to make this decision by yourself, and you are going to tell me what went on out there. Right now.”

  With that, he strode over to her and grabbed her shoulders, pulling her into his arms against her struggling. “Here is where you belong. And here you will stay, close to me, forever. I won’t let you go. If you wish to keep silent, fine. But you are going to the church with me on Saturday, and you will be my wife. I’ll tie you up and gag you if I have to, and drag you there by your hair, but you will be there, and you will say ‘I do’ when the question is put to you.”

  He lifted her chin with his hand and did not let go when she tried to move away, brushing his lips over hers softly, teasing the corners of her mouth ever so gently with the tip of tongue until he felt her resistance weaken.

  “Yes, Baby,” he breathed into her mouth when she finally opened it to his, “give in. You know I love you, you know I do. Let me kiss you now.”

  Relief flooded him when he felt her body lose its rigid posture and mold itself against his, but it lasted only for a heartbeat before she pulled away again.

  “I can’t, Jon.” Spoken with deep regret, but said nonetheless.

  He did not let her go completely, but loosened his grip somewhat.

  “So tell me. Tell me what made you flee into Sal’s embrace like that. God, he must have had the time of his life, you finally in his arms.”

  “This is not funny, Jon.” There was so much pain and loss in her voice, it frightened him all over again. “She said something. Sophie said something that broke me, and if Sal had not been there…”

  Patiently he waited, stroking her neck in a soothing motion, trying to ease the tension from her tight muscles.

  “She said…” Again, one of those dreadful pauses, then, finally, heart-stopping, the kernel of the matter, the thing that had brought on this bitter crisis. “She spoke of you making love to her, and the way y
ou made her surrender to you…the things you said to her…things I thought you had only said to me.”

  She tried to squirm out of his embrace, but he did not allow it.

  “Ah,” Jon sighed. “Jealousy. You are jealous, Baby. You think she got something that belongs exclusively to you. You hate the idea of some other woman being taken to that secret garden that is ours alone, and the ecstasy and passion.”

  “No. Yes. But not only that. It’s more than that. It’s the knowledge that despite you saying you never loved another woman, the way you love me there is at least one who feels like I do, and she is devastated now. And I feel rotten about it, and I’m thinking maybe…maybe…maybe you did wrong by that girl, and I’m not entitled at all to what I’m getting now.” She paused to draw a sobbing breath and tried once more to get away from him, but he held her firmly. “It’s unbearable; I keep seeing this picture of you, whispering to her, and Sophie instead of me trembling with anticipation and desire. And then you, with her, and…” She turned her head away. “And all those others. All that temptation, all the time, and they are all so young and beautiful…”

  He was so relieved; it was, after all, only jealousy, no matter how she tried to twist it, and maybe some feelings of guilt and fury at him, but no more than that. His hands caressed her back and waist, and he could sense the stiffness gradually weaken in her.

  “I like sex. I love it, and you know that. I’m not like you, I could never put it aside for years on end just out of pure willfulness, and I could see no good reason to, either. But there is a great difference between having sex and making love, and you know that too. You know the difference, and you know what real lovemaking feels like. You know when we really become one and leave this reality altogether, when we truly go to the secret garden together that the world goes away. And that place, that special, secret place is untouched by any other, and that I can swear to on everything I hold sacred, because I know.” He sighed painfully. “I know, because I searched hard for it in every moment I spent with another woman during the past seventeen years. But I never found it. Not with any other. Not with Sophie. It’s that easy: if I had, I would not be here now, pleading with you to let me take you to the altar on Saturday so I can finally be sure of the one single woman in the whole wide world who will take me to the garden when I hold her in my arms. Yes, my love, that’s you. My one and only.”