“Did you?”
“Return to the house? Yes, often. But not without always recalling the morning I walked in and found you gone. I still have that hair thing you left behind, the only thing you didn’t take.”
“So why did you return if it was that hard for you? You aren’t answering my question. Who lives there now?” She dug her heel into his thigh until he held her tightly.
“Stop that! I’m only wondering why you ask now. Does it matter? I rented it out to Art. He lives there with his girlfriend.”
Art had offered to take the house off his hands when it became clear he was unhappy there and wished to leave. Sal suggested he sell it, but Jon could not bring himself to do this. He did not want to stay there, but neither did he wish to let go of everything it meant to him.
“Art?” Naomi repeated, disbelief in her voice. “Art, of all people? Why would you do that?”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” He sighed. “I didn’t know you blamed him, all right? And I felt better knowing someone was living there who would take care of the place. Why is it so important? You don’t like it anyway.”
“I never said I didn’t like it.” Abruptly she sat up. “I only said I didn’t think I wanted to live there. There’s a great difference between the two. I loved that house, and you know it.”
Jon gazed at her in confusion. “So you don’t want to live there, and yet you don’t want anyone else to have it either. So what’s it going to be, a museum of lost love? Naomi, please. That house is worth a fortune. I can’t let it just sit there. Now that we are together again, I can sell it to Art if he wants it.”
“No. It’s the one place where I was really happy, with you. I don’t want it sold.”
“But…” He was tired from the long flight now and could not follow the twists and turns of her mind. “Well, what are we supposed to do? I’m not a very good landlord, I don’t care for that kind of obligation. Let him have the old thing and be done with it.”
“No!” Naomi had no idea where the sudden vehemence of her emotions came from, but now that she knew the house was still Jon’s, she felt she did not want to let go of it. “What happened to my bed?”
“Naomi,” he sighed. “You are doing it again, turning me around and around with your wild, jumping thoughts. God, you profess to hate something like mad and say that you will never go there again, and then when the mood takes you, you can’t wait to go back.”
“Well, don’t complain. After all, I’m here on this plane because I’m able to change my mind.”
“I need a drink.”
Naomi took the glass from him as soon as he sat down again. Alcohol on a plane, she informed him, was death for the complexion, and he needed to keep his nice and firm. There were too many females who would mourn if his skin grew old before its time. He plucked the glass from her again, a pained look on his face.
“The bed,” she reminded him. “What about my bed? Is Art sleeping in it now?”
“Of course not.” He sighed, closing his eyes in a mixture of exasperation and amusement. As if he would ever allow anyone else into that bed. It was hers, and it was still in their bedroom, the only room he had demanded remain unused by Art and Sue.
“How unkind.” Naomi pulled up the blanket and wrapped it around herself. “You denied them the nicest room in the house.”
Jon nodded solemnly. “So it was. So it is. And it’s mine.”
It was a small place; he had been right about that.
“For God’s sake, Jon. I don’t believe this. Why?” She could hardly envision him here, in this narrow wooden house on stilts, wedged between a dozen or more others, a long, tiring drive from the city.
Jon went to the glass door and stepped out into the warm breeze of a California morning.
“Why? There is no why. I couldn’t stay in Malibu. After you were gone, I wanted to get away from it all. I wanted to be by myself, and after a while I came to like it here. It’s peaceful.” He gave her a crooked smile. “In a way it’s a lot like Halmar, only I decided to live by myself and not have friends around me.”
There were no people on the beach, the tide was too high for that. Water and sky filled the view.
The deck was nice enough but sparsely furnished with a couple of Adirondack chairs, a barbecue, and a low wooden table. A pot in the corner held a withered lemon tree. A lone glass, forgotten by the cleaning woman, stood on the floor beside one of the chairs next to an ashtray, its contents blown away by the sea wind. On the railing, a row of stones, varying in shape and color, were lined up in a contemplative mood. Between them sat a number of seashells of different kinds. He had brought her collection with him, a foolish, sentimental gesture and a very loud statement.
Naomi picked up one of the rocks, a roundish thing nearly fistsize, and turned it over in her hands. “You said you never cared for my ‘debris.’ You used to laugh at me.”
“Well, yes.” He took it from her, toying with it. “It seems some things took on a different meaning. I found them after one storm or another, and I thought, she would like that one. She would make up a story about where it came from and why it ended up here. She would wash it in the surf and dry it on her skirt and say, ‘Poor little stone, so lost and battered, I will keep you close and cherish you. You will like it in my garden and feel right at home.’ I always imagined you were talking about me, using the wordplay about my name. So I started collecting them myself, wanting to…” He put it back in its place. “Oh, for Pete’s sake, this is so disgustingly sentimental. I shouldn’t be telling you this at all. You should not be seeing this place; it will give you the totally wrong impression.”
But when he tried to pull her back inside she resisted, still intent on the stones. One after another she touched them and looked at them closely. There was one among them that had streaks of turquoise in it, a silvery granite pebble not much larger than an egg, and one that was nearly white, round and perfect like a snowball. Another was jet black and jagged, the size of a human heart, with a crack down its center, and one was a red sandstone shard, flat and smooth, as if it had lain in the surf for ages.
“I think,” she said gently, “I’m getting exactly the right impression, and it’s no use trying to hide it, my love. It was my fault you decided to hide out here in this lonely place and collect rocks from the sea when I should have been keeping my most precious stone close to my heart, not letting it flounder in the tides.”
Jon went inside to see the driver off while Naomi remained alone, looking out over the water, listening to the surf and the wind and the wild screeching of the seagulls. She closed her eyes and let the warm sun shine on her face. The air, the smell, and the sounds put her back in a past she did not want to relive. And yet, as she stood there by herself on the small wooden veranda above the waves, she let her mind go its own way, her thoughts turning around the little collection of stones. She felt the words rolling around in her head as if they were pebbles in the surf. The poignancy of it all, the dried-up lemon tree and the used glass by the chair, and on top of that narrow ledge, those stones that cried out to her in loneliness and loss.
Wordplay, he had said, on his name.
There were only fragments at first, but they fell together into verses almost instantly.
Jon stopped in the doorway when he saw her with the notepad from his desk. “Those are verses. You’re writing verses.”
“Go away.” She felt embarrassed at having been caught. “I can’t think. Go make coffee.”
He retreated without another word.
Carefully, he held out a mug to her, not daring to come any closer. “Naomi. My beloved. Anything you want, it’s yours. But I beg you, that must be mine.”
She grinned up at him, pencil still poised over the paper, the satisfied gleam of achievement in her eyes. “You are a greedy bastard. But it’s yours. After all, they’re your little rocks. I never knew why I picked them up in the first place, but you did. So here you are.”
There was a little paus
e in which she listened to her mind.
“I think there is more to say. We really need to go back to the Malibu house. What do you think, would the Los Angeles police value a song about their work?”
“You did this to punish yourself, didn’t you?” she asked when they had finally retired to the bedroom, the balcony door wide open to let in the evening breeze.
Jon lay beside her, drowsy and relaxed, his arms under his head, body stretched out long on the sheets. “Not punishment; retirement. I can do what you did as well. Withdrawal. What made you think you were the only one taking damage that night? How did you expect me to go on when you dropped out of my life like that?”
She rolled over on her stomach and propped her chin on her hands, feet crossed in the air, locks tumbling all around her. “You frighten me. Ever again, you frighten me. Look at you, beautiful male that you are. Killer voice and musical grandmaster. You are not supposed to suffer for any one woman.”
He opened his eyes halfway at the hushed sound of her voice. “You. Beautiful. Stunning. So gifted. You sit down and scribble for five minutes, and out comes a song to break hearts. You, who could go out there and write for anyone, and you pick me. Once again, you pick me and put up with me.”
“The stuff I write is only good because you make it good. It’s only words. They mean nothing without your music and your voice.” Her hand trailed across his chest.
“I love the lyrics about the stones. I just love them. I’ve never read a more precious declaration of love, and I adore the way you played around with my name. Our name, soon. Yours too. My wife. I can still hardly believe you consented to be my wife. Truly, truly mine, at last. From the moment I first kissed you, that’s what I always wanted. I knew right away I would find my peace only with you. Promise me. Promise you’ll never leave me again. Whatever happens, never leave. Please don’t go again.”
“Oh.” A soft giggle. “So now here I am in the bed that has seen so many others, and you have the nerve to demand such a promise from me? No shame at all? Tell me, how many? Did you keep count?”
Jon groaned.
“No, come on. Confess. I want to know. Otherwise when I go down to Rodeo Drive with Solveigh tomorrow I’ll have to look at every one of the stylish woman and ask myself which ones you laid out here on these sheets for your amusement.”
“Laid out for…” This made him sit up, wide awake, taken aback by her choice of words. “But Naomi, you have a way of putting things sometimes…I don’t know what to say. You don’t seriously expect me to discuss this with you, do you?”
Of course she did. And yes, were any of them famous? Did he have a hot affair with an actress? But no; she answered her own question with some wickedness, she would have read or heard about that, right? So he must have been really discreet.
“Baby.” He twisted her hair around his hand. “Stop. Here I’m trying to tell you how badly I love you and you go and start keeping score? What did you expect, that I lived like a monk? I never cared for being alone.”
“Oh no.” She struggled against him. “No lovemaking in this bed of yours here. Not with me. And anyway, I’m going to get my hair cut if you keep this up. Stop pulling!”
“Baby, if you get your hair cut I’ll divorce you before we ever get married, I swear. I love your hair, I love how it tangles around us when we are really at it, and it turns me on to no end when it sticks to our sweaty skin, all those lovely black tendrils on your perfect white breasts and framing your face.”
A soft, enticing threat, his body moving closer to hers, touching her.
“I was on the point of falling asleep. You woke me up with your teasing. So I think you will have to deal with it now.”
“Dealing like crazy.” There was laughter in her voice, he could feel it rippling through her, a tantalizing vibration against him.
“You see, Baby, you see what you do to me. I want you all the time, even when I’m so dead tired. No one else has ever done that to me, could ever measure up to you. You, all you need to do is lie here beside me in your t-shirt, and it’s enough. You are not supposed to do that. You should not be so alluring and exciting all the time. Just hearing that laugh of yours makes me go wild. And look, your lips are parting in that way that tells me you need to be kissed right now, oh yes, kissed deep and good, and then you’ll sigh a little into my mouth, and then I’m lost. You do it all the time.”
“God. All those words. You talk too much. All the time, talking yourself into trouble, when really you should save your breath for singing. Whatever am I going to do with all the songs that still need to be written if you ruin your voice talking?”
“I’ll sing them, never fear,” he whispered. “On my deathbed, I’ll sing to you if you want me to. My last breath, it will be a song to you. Even if no one else listens to me anymore, if you want me to, I’ll sing my love to you.”
In the bright light of the morning, a coffee mug in her hand, Naomi stood again on the deck and looked out across the ocean. She tried to imagine him with Joshua’s letter, reading and rereading it, the turmoil he must have felt.
When he came down the stairs, she asked, “Tell me, how was it when you got the letter? It was here that you received it, was it not?”
Surprised, Jon stopped on the last step. His eyes wandered to the kitchen counter where she had put his coffee. He had not thought about it at all since he had returned. Incongruously, he recalled the splashed milk on the countertop.
“I stood right here. It was early morning, and the beach was fairly empty. I had no idea what to expect, and it hit me like…”
Naomi watched the emotions play over his face as he let the memory return.
“I dropped it. It fell from my hands, and I just stared at it, unable to collect my thoughts.” He shrugged. “That’s all. I grabbed a few things and left. Called a cab and just walked out of the house. The next morning, I was with you. As soon as I realized what had happened, that was all I could think of. Finally, after all that time, I wanted to find out why you had left like that. I was scared, and yet I had some hope.”
Slowly he put down his cup on the railing, right next to the stones.
“I think I left my coffee out here, too. It’s a wonder I remembered to close the door.”
Naomi refused the limousine. She had discovered Jon’s Porsche in the garage beside the house and insisted he drive them downtown. Jon looked at her in exasperation, but she smiled at him so sweetly that finally he gave in.
It was such a simple thing, driving to work on an ordinary Wednesday morning right into the heart of LA, but it gave her an inordinate amount of joy to sit beside him while he drove, sunglasses over his eyes, shirt half open, his bare feet in loafers, elbow resting on the car door.
Naomi gazed at him as he maneuvered the car through traffic, singing along with the music under his breath, relaxed and at ease, free. In this moment, he had it all, and he looked it, radiating contentment like light.
“Baby?” he asked when he noticed she was looking at him, “Something wrong?”
“I can’t stay at the studio. I’m taking Solveigh out shopping. We need some California clothes. She’ll love it. I want shorts. And sun tops. Oh, and a bathing suit. I can’t believe I forgot to bring one.” The car swerved a little as his concentration wavered, and she laughed.
It was just as she remembered it.
The band was there, chatting and tuning their instruments, Rodney massaging his hands and shaking out his fingers, Sean fiddling with his keyboards, Jones and Joshua discussing guitars and testing strings and picks, the background vocalists humming the new melodies. There was a full orchestra, ready to start on the movie soundtrack. Jon, Russ, and Art had gone into the mixing room to discuss the proceedings with the conductor and the director of the movie. Solveigh was sitting on the table, dangling her legs and sipping fruit juice from a large plastic cup.
“I love it here,” she declared. “They have these freshly pressed juices in all flavors, and the servings are so
huge. I’m not going back to Norway. I’m a Californian at heart. Being born in Norway was a mistake of Mother Nature.”
The look Jon gave her when he saw Naomi sitting down on the edge of that table nearly made her faint. Through the glass panel separating the rooms, he was staring at her. Art was talking to him, but it was obvious he was barely listening. All she could do was return his stare, right into his eyes across the distance that separated them, and endure the terrible, sudden desire this moment woke in her. She saw his lips move and knew he was not speaking to anyone close to him but was mouthing something at her, sharing the same memory.
“Are you alright?” Solveigh eyed her anxiously. “You have the strangest look on your face.”
Russ was only too pleased to give Solveigh his credit card. He urged her to have fun and buy herself the prettiest bikini she could find, patting her behind fondly as he said it.
“Give me your car keys.” Naomi held out her hand when she went over to kiss Jon goodbye.
He hesitated.
“Come on. It’s that or I’ll rent a Ferrari, and then I’ll be driving it all the time, and you can try to catch up in your inferior little German car.”
With a sigh he handed over the keys. “If I’d known you would go all wild on me, I would never have brought you back here. I hate the thought of you going off by yourself like this. I would prefer that you had a driver and a closed limousine. I should get you a Rolls. With bullet-proof glass.”
She gave him a tight, suggestive embrace that made him respond in surprise and with some fervor. “Don’t be afraid. We won’t go where there are bad boys. I only want to spend some of your money. You like me to spend your money, right?” He nodded. “So give me the card, sweet boy. Solveigh needs to see the expensive stores, and I need to see Solveigh ripping LA apart.”
His eyes twinkled as he handed over the same card he had used to pay for his lonesome flight to Norway. In a slightly threatening undertone, he told her to remember, no jewelry on her own.
“Ah.” She turned the plastic in her hands. “Here I have the no-limit thing in my hand, and you tell me that now? Too late.”
The Distant Shore (Stone Trilogy) Page 15
