Broadway.
“Baby?” His attention returned to her. For an instant he was frightened, she was once more radiating the still withdrawal he hated so much. But this time it was different, it was disbelief and awe, and a mirror of his own feelings.
“Kiss me again,” Naomi said in a hushed voice. “Only do it properly this time. A little more intensity, if you please.”
A few days before they were supposed to leave for Christmas in New York and Toronto, Jon was on the point of calling it all off, just because he was so intrigued by the incredible quietness around them. Snow had fallen like a thick white blanket, and with it came a slowing of their daily life that made time literally creep along.
He was amazed at the leisure with which the people around him spent their dark days, decorating their homes and the little town with great care, attending church services filled with still, warm contemplation and traditional, well-worn Christmas Carols.
It was Naomi who made him stick to their original plans.
“I’m so looking forward to seeing New York with all the Christmas lights,” she said one morning. “I’ve always wanted to dive into that hustle and bustle. You’ll have to go to Bergdorf with me, Jon. I’ve dreamed of seeing that since I was small. And Tiffany’s. And the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. Oh, and ice skating! Do you skate? Can we go skating? And there’s this huge toy shop, I forget the name…”
“FAO Schwarz,” he groaned.
Andrea had made waffles for breakfast. They had not been upstairs in the dining room for a meal for a long time, preferring the solitude of their apartment to the hotel, but the scent of cinnamon and butter had lured them upstairs early.
During the past few weeks Naomi had tried a couple of times to cook for them, but anything more complicated than instant soup eluded her. He had watched her in amused exasperation as she read the instructions on the box of a frozen pizza, her brow wrinkled, her lips moving, until finally he had taken it away from her. “Good thing we can afford to eat out most of the time or we would starve! You are hopeless. How did you survive all these years?”
“Andrea cooked. Just as she does now. I never needed to bother. In LA, it was your housekeeper. Before that, my mother or her housekeeper.” It made her stop and think. “And you?”
Jon had been standing next to her with the pizza still in his hands, turning the carton over thoughtfully.
He had tried so hard to find her, listening to her father’s cold and polite statements over and over that it would be useless for him to go to Geneva, she was not there, and no, he would not be told where she was.
He had never told anyone; after a few weeks of brooding he had gone to Geneva, on his own, but to no avail. Certain in the knowledge that her parents would not see him, he had hung around outside their apartment building in the hope of catching her. Her father had come and gone, picked up or dropped off by a chauffeur-driven limousine, always in impeccable suits, a leather briefcase in hand, and her mother had driven her Mercedes convertible in and out of the garage, but never Naomi. When the concierge accosted him after a couple of days, he learned that she had never reappeared there at all. He felt ridiculous and pathetic, and he kept his solitary venture to European soil an absolute secret.
Art had taken over the house in Malibu, and Jon had descended into a prolonged bout of dark depression that he first tried to cure with solitude and then with a manic swirl of Hollywood nightlife. But he had always returned to his small abode on the shore, and he had learned to look after himself.
He had learned to cook. It had been therapeutic in its own way, forcing him to concentrate on it with a certain mindlessness, following the sometimes cryptic instructions cookbooks, but he had persevered and in the end was quite adept at fixing meals for himself. He had hated eating alone and became sloppy after a while, taking the pan with him out on his small deck and eating from it while the surf crashed near his house.
“There was time enough over the years,” he now replied in a light tone. “And no one cooked the pasta with shrimp and garlic just the way I wanted it.” With a deft twist, he opened the pizza box. “They always put parsley in it, and God, I just hate parsley.”
“You could teach me.” She watched how he sprinkled extra cheese on it and put some olives on her half.
“Nah. You don’t need to learn to cook, Baby. I’d love to cook for you. I want to.”
“But then I’ll never be a proper wife, Jon!” He did not let her take the baking tray from him when she tried, and pushed it into the oven instead.
“You want to be a proper wife?” Jon asked, washing his hands, “Really? I’ll teach you to be a proper wife alright, dear heart, and it has nothing to do with cooking at all.”
She was not fast enough. He caught her halfway up the stairs to the loft.
The neighborhood lay in silent dusk when the car pulled up in front of Helen’s house. Joshua opened the door. He gave them a critical look up and down and yelled into the house, “Grandma, the jet-setters are here!”
“And good day to you, young man,” Jon replied, pleased to see how well he had settled in with his family.
“Well, don’t let them stand out there like strangers,” Helen shouted back. “Bring in the luggage, if they have any. Knowing your father, he’s probably only planning to stop for a cup of coffee.”
“Thanks, Ma.” Jon called, “The luggage is at the hotel already. We only dropped by for brief hello and then we’ll be gone.”
Helen came from the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel. She wore jeans and a fan t-shirt of Jon’s, her silver bob covered with a kerchief..
“You’re early,” she said crossly. “I haven’t changed yet and dinner isn’t ready.”
Jon grinned at her. “Nice shirt, Ma. I didn’t know you were a fan of mine.”
“You can’t have your old room back,” Joshua announced when they had joined Helen in the kitchen. “It’s mine now. I threw out some of your old things, too.”
Jon sat in one of the chairs around the big oak table and took the coffee Helen held out to him. Naomi had vanished somewhere in the depths of the house to find Valerie, and he could hear their voices echoing down the hall, laughing, calling to each other and to the girls.
The phone rang, there was trampling on the stairs and the sound of a TV when a door was torn open suddenly and then slammed shut again, some more shouting and more wild running.
Kevin and Sarah would come for dinner, Helen announced, and they would have to make plans for the next few days. How long were they going to stay, and would he go out and get a tree tomorrow morning and put it up?
“If you know how to do that, I mean.”
“Mom, please.” He wanted her teasing; he wanted the noise and the disorder and the bustle, and he wanted to be in the middle of it, letting the feeling of family and belonging wash over him and wrap around him like the wrapping on a Christmas gift.
The kitchen smelled wonderful. Roast beef, potatoes, and fresh cookies all mixed together to form an aroma that could only be called home. The windows were hung with garlands of evergreens and red bows. There was the reindeer figure on the sill he remembered from his childhood, and the bowl with the tiny ruby apples his mother always bought for the season, and another with nuts and dried apricots.
“Where do you want the tree, Ma?” Jon had moved to the living room.
Helen had placed lit candles on the mantelpiece and hung up the stockings.
“By the fireplace. And you might as well go to the attic and bring down the decorations. But don’t drop anything, you hear me? And don’t fall off the ladder!”
“Won’t, Mom.”
For the life of him, he could not understand why he had given up on this and not returned home at least for the holidays once in a while.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Valerie asked from behind him as he started up the rungs of the attic ladder. “You’ll break a leg for sure.”
“And hello to you too, sister dear. I
’m doing the chores my mother gave me. Where’s my wife?”
“Your wife,” she snorted, “is not your lapdog, and I would strongly advise her not to climb up after you. If you break a leg we’ll hire a nurse and put you up in a private hospital room where you can rant and whine, but if Naomi breaks a bone we’ll have to deal with your hysterics here all day long. I’d sooner jump into the Hudson than endure that.” Valerie held the rickety ladder for him until he had vanished in the darkness under the roof. “Nice butt, brother. You sure take care of yourself.”
“Val, go away and do something useful. Polish the banister or something equally important.”
This, he decided when he stood in the dim, musty space of the attic and dusted off his hands, was fun. It was loving, easy, heart felt fun.
“Are you hiding from your family already?” Naomi’s head appeared through the opening. “This is a dead end.”
She looked around curiously while he searched for the box with the decorations that his mother wanted. “Attics are a treasure trove. There’s always history hidden somewhere. Will I find interesting things from your past if I dig deep enough, do you think?”
“Probably.” His voice sounded muffled from the corner he was in. “Embarrassing stuff that will tell you more about me than I ever wanted you to know. So no, don’t start digging.”
She opened the door of an old wardrobe.
There were clothes in plastic coverings inside, but then she realized they were his stage shirts, neatly washed and pressed and labeled, one after the other, a hundred of them at least.
“I think I’ll pass on the youth stuff and look at these instead.”
There it was: deep, dark red, beads on the sleeves and the breast, the collar too wide and the waist too narrow for current taste. but beautiful nonetheless. That kiss, it was still so vivid in her mind, the hot rhythm, driven on by Sean and the bass drums, the stadium thronged with people, the warm Mediterranean summer night, her excitement and turmoil at finding herself standing there at the side of the huge stage, and Jon. Jon, moving with the music, his guitar in his hands, making love to the audience, young, unbridled. In that shirt, with the impossible embroidery, he had sung “Secret Garden” in public for the first time. The world had taken notice by then, and he was on the point of stepping from popularity to utter stardom. Even the tasteless thing he had worn in London was there, the last in the line, a sort of cowboy shirt, mortifying in its blatant appeal for attention.
“I would like to take this one back home.” She brought out the red one. “Do you think Helen would mind?”
He came over to look at what she had unearthed.
“God. Geneva. I kissed the loveliest girl in that shirt, and I had my mind on her through the entire show. But she tells me that’s not how it works! I’ll never forget that sentence. Such a put-down, and from a young thing who should have fallen at my feet right away!” He took the shirt from her.
“And here. The one you wore in London last winter.” She held it out to him. “Put it on for me?”
“You do have a penchant for torturing yourself,” Jon said slowly. “Why would you want to relive that night? I know you were hurt, Baby. And I remember being very sad when I sang ‘Secret Garden.’ I was almost ready to give up.”
Somewhere deep in her chest was a pain, it was true, but it was a pleasant kind of pain now, encapsulated in warm reality.
With a shrug he acquiesced and pulled off his turtleneck.
“I thought it was rather nice.” He peeled the covering from the show shirt. “Colorful and easy to recognize even from the furthest seats, high up under the rafters. I climbed all the way up to the highest rows before the show to get a view of the stage, and I tell you, it is far, far away.” He paused. “I climbed up there and stared down at my stage while you stood outside with the fans. God.”
“By then I wasn’t standing there anymore. I had gone to pick up Joshua and have tea with him. I had seen what I had come to see.” She held his sweater to her face to catch his scent. “I had seen you, getting off the bus, and you were just as desirable and wonderful as ever. I wanted you. I wanted you back, and I wanted to forget you, but my mistake! Being in the same city with you was too much. Seeing you there, in front of me, seeing you on stage, singing our song…oh well.” She tried a smile and failed. “We know what happened next, right? I couldn’t keep my big trap shut and had to spill my dirty little secret to our son.”
“I only wish I had noticed you in that group,” Jon said. “I would have plucked you up, my dove, and Sean would have had to do the soundcheck because I would have been too busy showing you in words and deeds where you belong.”
He had buttoned up the shirt and was adjusting the cuffs and collar, standing very straight, his feet slightly apart and his shoulders back, taking the commanding stance he always had on stage.
“Jon.”
He looked up to see tears in her eyes. “It’s okay, Baby. Everything is okay now. Come here.”
Seeing him in that shirt had undone her; it had thrown her back to that cold, unfriendly day in London and the feeling of hopelessness and terrible grief and Joshua’s biting remarks.
He was holding her close, his lips in her hair, stroking his hands over her shoulders and back. “These stupid shirts. I didn’t know my mother kept them up here.”
Naomi, though, was shaken by the imagination of what might have happened that night in London if she had walked up to him, and by all the wild emotions she had lived through that day.
“Look at it this way, love. If you hadn’t come to London for that concert, you would never have decided to tell Joshua. You needed that incentive, you needed the fresh pain. You needed to see I was still a living, breathing man and not just a picture on a CD cover.” He took her face between his hands and gazed into her eyes. “You’re still punishing yourself. You still relive the past and stir it up, but it only brings pain.”
“That’s not it.” Shamefacedly she tried to free herself from his embrace.
“What then? Here I stand in my stage shirt and you go to pieces, and it’s not because of our lost past?”
She shook her head, unwilling to speak up.
“Oh, there’s a secret here! Come on, spill, little beast!”
She sighed. “It’s seeing you in the shirt, remembering how you looked then, on stage. I wonder what would have happened if I had truly come up to you.”
He laughed softly at those words. There was a large crate against the wall, and he pulled her over and made her sit down with him.
“Listen well, little beast, I’m going to tell you the whole London story.”
From downstairs they could hear the doorbell and Kevin’s voice booming through the stairwell, Helen calling for them, Joshua’s footsteps in the hallway, but Jon shouted down, “We’ll be down in a minute.” Then he turned back to Naomi. “This is how it goes. Where do I see you? Outside, with the fans, or at the beginning of the concert?” Again he stopped briefly. “Sean is telling me about some new arrangement or other, I’m a bit grumpy because the coffee was lousy and there were no cinnamon rolls at Starbucks.”
“Lousy coffee at Starbucks?” she murmured, but he shook his head.
“Don’t interrupt. Okay. I glance toward the fan group because someone shouts a greeting and waves, and God, all those women in their ugly clothes and their flat, ungainly shoes! What’s this all about? Am I not worth a little more consideration, for God’s sake? Here I travel across continents and oceans to bring my music to these people, and they show up in parkas and sweaters? Why do I take the trouble to outfit the band and myself and drag around a makeup artist and a costume specialist if my fans don’t give a fart how they look? No, but wait—there’s a gem! But there’s this red-haired lady with a rough German accent in front of her, and hell, she is one ugly woman! The glimpse I just caught, it reminds me of someone, it reminds me of my lost love, of the one I loved beyond sense and reason and who still burns in my heart, the girl I’m always looki
ng for. In every city and at every concert, she’s the one I hope to find, and here, on this drab winter day in London, it happens, finally. She’s well hidden behind the fat German, but it’s enough for me to step forward.”
Jon looked larger and even more vibrant than in real life in the colorful, embroidered shirt, even up here under the tired light of a single bulb.
“So I step forward,” he continued, “and the German smiles at me angelically. Gosh, but she has bad taste in lipstick! Red hair and orange lipstick? Please! But right there behind her, hiding from me, hiding…”
He toyed with her rings, lost in his own fantasy for a moment.
“She has not changed over the years. She’s just as lovely and sweet as she was, and I want her, I want her back, God yes, that one glance is enough for me. I can see in her eyes that she has come here to ask exactly that question but is unsure of herself and of me. This time, this time I’m going to hold on.”
She leaned into his shoulder and rested her head under his chin.
“The ugly German watches, they all watch, as I make a fool of myself right there outside the venue, as I ask her to please, please come with me, give me the chance to show her I love her still.” He shrugged slightly. “Ah, here it comes! She does follow me inside, but she keeps her distance, she has her doubts. And I want her in my arms, I need her, I’ve missed her for so long, I need her to hold me and make me real, so I take her to my dressing room even though Sal is after me and wants us to do the soundcheck right now…I tell him to go to hell. I tell him to do whatever he pleases but to leave us alone, let us settle this, give me the time to set things right…and she still has not said a word and just stands there. I can feel she wants to run. But I won’t allow it. Oh no, not this time.”
The Distant Shore (Stone Trilogy) Page 27
