Kathleen Valentine (8 page)

The reasons for my being here are simple. The Board of Directors of the Haven needed to raise funds to replace the roof and some storm windows. Stash, the recently hired manager, had come up with an intriguing plan. The attic, he discovered during his systematic reorganization of his new domain, was packed with a hundred and fifty years worth of debris left by wandering seamen. He could only guess at the history of most of the treasures—were they carried home for a sweetheart who proved to be unfaithful or were they simply too cumbersome to continue on in the sea bag of a footloose adventurer? Since most of the items had no name on them, the Board, at Stash’s suggestion, decided they were now the property of the Haven and should be put to good use by being auctioned off to raise funds for the repairs. An auction committee was formed and I, faced with a long winter, volunteered to take on the job of sorting through, organizing, cataloguing and arranging for any needed appraisals of the treasures.
Thus began a long series of stark winter afternoons with Stash as my only companion.
I didn’t fall in love with him at first. I liked him, of course. He was soft-spoken and entertaining—identifying many of the items that we unwrapped and telling me what he knew of their origins and possible histories. Mostly there were clothes—a lot of silk, robes and shirts and kimonos and shawls, corsets made of baleen and whale bones, jewelry and carved combs for ladies hair. But there were toys, scrimshaw items, carved ivory, tribal masks, baskets of every shape and size, tools, amulets, blue and white china that Stash told me had served as ballast in ships full of tea returning from the East. There were hundreds of books, curious musical instruments, knives, wooden boxes, and many varieties of matryoshka—nested dolls from Russia and the Orient. The afternoons began to feel like an endless Christmas that only Stash and I shared. As each box was unwrapped and its contents examined it seemed my world expanded.
"Let me see that," he said as I unwrapped a beautifully carved shallow wooden box enclosed in glass.
"Look," I handed it to him. "There are hundreds of seashells—all different colors. That must have taken someone a long time to make."
Stash grinned as he turned it around in his enormous hands. "Well, back in the days of sail men had more time than they usually wanted. They call that a Sailor’s Valentine."
"What?" I moved next to him and bent my head close. I had been conscious of his fragrance for a long time now—the pungent maleness underscoring pine-scented soap, coffee, and a faint hint of something peppery and warm.
"Mariners would gather shells from the beaches of islands they visited and then spend idle hours aboard ship making these..." He looked at me and I caught a fleeting glance of something that made me quiver. He handed it back and stood up, moving toward the door. "... for their girlfriends or wives," he concluded. "Want another cup of coffee?"
"Sure." I followed him down to the quiet kitchen.
Before I fell in love with Stash, I fell in love with the Haven. I fell in love with its lack of demands and pretensions. It was a world where expectations were few and disappointments commonplace. Not a pretty world but a forgiving one where failures were overlooked and a barren life, or a barren womb, went unnoticed.
My time there became precious to me and I found myself reluctant to leave as the afternoon faded. Sometimes in the evening, when Rob was away or working late or even sequestered in his study staring into his flat panel computer screen, I found myself wondering about the Haven, how many men were staying there tonight, and what Stash was talking with them about over the dinners he fixed in the kitchen that had become so familiar.
"We had a real character here last night," he would say as he poured coffee for me the next morning. "Big chip on his shoulder, just looking for trouble."
"Really?" His tone startled me. "Did you call the police?"
He laughed a tight, mirthless laugh. "It didn’t get that far. I straightened him out but it would be just fine with me if he didn’t come back tonight."
He placed a blue china plate containing a warm cinnamon roll next to my coffee mug.
"Do you have problems like that often?"
He shook his head. "Not really. Most of the guys who stay here are decent. You get a guy who’s had a few too many shots down at The Crow’s Nest once in awhile but most of the guys know I won’t let them in if they have too much of a snoot full. Eat your roll, I saved it for you. Don’t tell me you’re dieting, I hate it when women say that." He winked at me and I blushed.

At first I began noticing older men in the street. Big men with gray hair and rough dress. I found myself longing for the company of earthy, weathered men who laughed more easily and listened more attentively. Then I found myself fantasizing about them—delicious, evocative fantasies—a new and shocking experience for me. I’d never given in much to sexual fantasy. As a girl all my fantasies had been about romance, long never-ending kisses and smoldering looks. Rob was my only lover and he always made me very happy. But somehow I found myself driving along the wharves and piers looking for big men in workmen’s clothes, churning with an agitation I didn’t understand.
Perhaps it is somewhat to my credit that I didn’t realize what was going on inside of me. Though I often found myself driving out the commercial fishing pier to watch men mending nets and unloading crates of fish I didn’t know what drew me there. Yet I went again and again. The waterfront drew me as heartlessly as a siren’s song.
It was a nasty, bitter, rain-swept morning when a tall man in yellow rubber Grundies bolted across the street, thumping his hand on the hood of my car as he ran. He turned briefly and flashed a grin—he was dark-skinned and weather-battered with a tangle of graying curls and jet black eyes. In that second my heart danced and my stomach clenched—and the pulsing between my thighs made me twitch as though I had been shocked.
I sat there, blocking traffic, until the car behind me honked and I lurched forward, my hands and thighs shaking. I was infatuated, I realized. More than infatuated—I was yearning with every inch of my body for the caress of a man who was not my husband. Nothing could have surprised me more.
"Hi," he said when I let myself into the kitchen. "The coffee just finished dripping. I’ll pour you one."
I hung my coat up and watched as he added just the right amount of milk and a slight dash of sugar.
"I didn’t think you’d come today," he said handing it to me. "A real blow day out there, I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to stay out of it." He turned to the cupboard as I sat at the table my thighs trembling too hard to stay standing. "I saved you a piece of the coffee cake I made."
The Captain’s Clock in the dining room chimed four bells and I could hear the deep, sonorous voice of Gordon Bok drifting from a radio in another room. Rain splattered hard against the window over the sink with stinging, icy pellets.
"You okay?" Stash said as he placed a fragrant piece of cake on an earthenware plate in front of me. It smelled of nutmeg and apples and cloves.
"What?" I raised my eyes to his as he took a seat opposite me.
"You’re not your usual bubbly self." His grin was a little crooked and a little shy.
I nodded. Plump currants peeked out between the crumbs on the plate. I picked one up with my fingers and tasted it.
"It’s delicious."
He studied me not paying attention to my comment. "Things okay at home?"
Stash and I never talked about my home life. Later I realized that he always knew that I was the wife of his cousin’s son but he never alluded to it and, at that time, I didn’t know it myself.
"Yes, I suppose. Life’s never quite what you expect, is it?"
He flashed a wry grin. "Guess it depends on what you expect."
I nodded and kept my eyes away from his and all the enticing mysteries they held. The silence seemed suddenly unbearable even in this silent place but I was helpless to break it.
"Fight?" Stash said and his discomfort in asking rippled out around the word as though it were a rock pitched into a quiet pond.
"No." I shook my head.
He waited until it was obvious I wasn’t going to continue. "Christine..." he paused. I loved it when he said my name. I looked up and his eyes were moving over me with such affection I could have cried.
"I’m scared," I blurted horrified at my own audacity, "I’m afraid I’ve ruined everything."
"Everything?" He frowned. "Not here. I think you’re doing a terrific job."
"No." I felt hot, shameful tears welling up.
His look turned puzzled with genuine concern.
"What?" He said it quietly in barely above a whisper. "I hate seeing you like this. What could you do that would ruin anything?"
I looked directly at him, bolder than I have ever been in all my good girl life.
"I could fall in love with a man who is not my husband."
Nothing could have startled him more. He understood me completely and a faint shiver of premonition shuddered across his face. He stared at me for a moment then stood and walked to the window. The tears scorched my burning cheeks. I looked at the dark outline of his big head and shoulders cast into shadow by the frosty light outside the window. I’d go home and call the president of our board and make up something. I’d say I wasn’t well and spend the rest of the winter in bed with some mysterious malady like a lady out of a Victorian novel wasting away in her room from frustration and longing that she dared not reveal to the world. My chair scraped the floor as I pushed it backward and rose. What must he think of me? What a thing to say to a man of his refined and old-fashioned sensibilities. My shame was devastating. I reached for my coat trying not to let out a sob before I was outside this still and austere world.
His hand closed over mine as I reached and, in the same moment his arm went round my waist pulling me back against him. I felt the brush of his jaw and then his lips pushed, hot and dry, into the curve of my neck. I sunk back against him weak with both relief and desire as his hand moved down over my belly and his mouth moved up along my jaw. He cradled my chin in his big hand and turned my face to meet his kiss. I covered his hands with mine and pushed them harder against me. Don’t stop, I wanted to say but my voice had worn itself out.
I’d never made love with anyone but Rob and my experience before him had been awkward and fumbling but Stash was the farthest thing from an uncertain boy. I could only guess at his amorous past—in all our time together he had never so much as mentioned a lover—but he knew exactly what I wanted. He lifted my hair from the back of my neck and his mouth and tongue found all the places longing to be found. The pressure of his body was heated and exquisite as he moved closer turning me expertly, an arm around my waist as he tipped me sideways, out of balance and totally into his control. He kissed me deeply, holding me in one of those marvelous movie star embraces of years gone by—the way Rhett kissed Scarlet and Heathcliff kissed Cathy and Rick kissed Ilsa and nobody ever seems to kiss anybody in real life.
I gasped and slipped my arms up over his shoulders and he bent me deeper, further, lifting me into him and tipping me downward so that I could fall what little way there was left into him and I was lost and he was there and we were lost together.
We waltzed the ancient lovers waltz of kisses and caresses through the silent dining room and down an endless hallway to his room and his single, bachelor’s bed. Everything was excruciatingly intense and frenzied and so achingly immediate. He wasted not a movement but undressed us both swiftly and lifted me into his bed even as he moved over me and into me and I pressed upward engulfing him with a need that shocked me.
"Yes," I said, "yes" as I rushed gratefully and with abandon into deceit and infidelity and the most demanding passion I had ever known.
I had never let myself think too much about sex. I was raised in a family that did not discuss "such things" and, aside from minor and embarrassing pubescent experiments, I was always sexually conservative. When Rob and I began dating his kisses and his touch aroused me more than any I had experienced to that point so I assumed that meant we were in love. When Rob discovered I was a virgin he was so enchanted that he waited until we were engaged and the wedding date set before he claimed me for his own. In all the years that followed I had no complaints. Rob was young and handsome and energetic. His sexual past had been considerable and he taught me everything he thought it useful for a wife to know.
In the first years of our marriage we made love so often I had neither the urge nor the stamina to consider sex with anyone else. When we passed our fifth anniversary and then our tenth the passion remained and if we made love less often it was still sufficiently frequent and energetic that I believed we were fortunate to have found each other. I never imagined sex with anyone but Rob.
But then there was Stash and, while I felt it somehow terribly wrong to compare my husband with my lover, I had no other basis for comparison. That first afternoon alone in the silent mystery of the Seaman’s Haven I entered a world of languid, slow, sensual lovemaking that eclipsed every moment of frenzied passion I had known. My body opened and unfolded to a realm of sensation and pleasure I had never imagined. My experience of sex had always been intense, urgent, and athletic. Stash moved with me dreamily, slowly, hovering on the brink of every breath before tumbling into yet another experience of my body’s endless capacities for awakening. Desire was concurrent with satiation yet relentless. Stash left me breathless and forever changed.
Our afternoons became exquisite respites from the very different worlds we lived in. Whether we made love or just lay together talking it was as though we entered a dimension in which families and childlessness, fractured lives and rootless men, had no meaning. It was just Stash and I alone sharing the shivering sensations of each other’s bodies and whispered stories about far away places and long-ago times.
"There was an old sailor," he whispered to the rhythm of iced willow tree branches chattering against his window in a February wind. "Amazing old guy, tough as rope, with a face like one of those dolls made from dried apples and snow white hair that he wore in a braid to his waist. He had worked the whaling ships up through the North Atlantic and into Hudson Bay. Young guys made the mistake of underestimating him and, more often than not, they came to regret it. At night he would sit on deck to smoke and watch the sea. I was little more than a boy myself but I’d sit with him. I’d just watch him smoke and wonder what those colorless eyes of his were seeing when they studied the water. Sometimes he told me stories about the old days when men chased after whales in dory boats and hauled them home with nothing more than rope and human muscle."
"Tell me more," I purred burrowing into him. After making love to me he liked to turn me on my side facing away from him and fold himself over me, nestling his face in my hair and whispering his stories into my ear as he softly stroked my trembling body. Everything with him was bliss. Everything.
"I asked him why he spent the nights on deck. He often stayed there all night long and he told me that he was waiting to hear the mermaids sing."
"Mermaids?" I kissed the back of his hand as it moved over my throat and shoulder.
"Mmhmm. He said he had been at sea a long, long time and in all those many years he’d never heard their song. He said other men had and that you never knew what the mermaids would ask of you but that when they sang you had no choice but to listen to their song."
"Did he ever hear them?"
I felt the motion of him nod as his jaw brushed through my hair. "I remember the night it happened like it was yesterday. If you’ve never spent nights at sea you can’t understand how beautiful it can be. When the moon comes up over the waves and they turn silver with its rising..." he drew a deep breath "...there’s nothing more lovely. I was sitting beside him but he was quiet that night, watching and listening. I fell asleep. When I woke in the morning his jacket was tucked around me and he was gone. No one had seen him. Nobody could imagine what would make a crusty old guy like that take a swim but I knew he’d finally heard his mermaid and gone to her."
"He..." I tried to turn toward him but he held me softly in place "...he jumped overboard? Why?"
"Shhhh, don’t question the story." He kissed my cheek and my eyelid. "I thought about him a lot after that. Some nights I sat on deck and strained to hear mermaid song. But years went by and eventually I left the big ships and worked on gill netters and stayed closer to shore. Finally, I left the sea and forgot about those legends — until I met you." I felt his chest rise against my back as he drew a deep breath. "That morning when you told me..." his voice trembled "...when you told me that you were falling in love, I looked out of the window down to the harbor and it happened. I heard them. It was exactly as he said it would be—the song of the mermaids was so sweet and so strong that I finally understood." He burrowed his face deeply into my hair. "When the mermaids sing a man has no choice but to answer their song."
We are quiet now. He goes to the sink and washes the few dishes, sets them in a drying rack and then holds his hands under the sparkling stream of water and rubs a bar of soap between them. The lather bubbles up and slides down through the dense, dark hair of his forearms. As lovers we have never shared the intimacies of lives lived in tandem. I have never lain in bed and watched him shave in the bathroom mirror, moving his jaw and throat purposefully under the scrape of slick steel. We have never spent a night together. I imagine him waking in the morning, coming into the day still a little trapped in the night. Sometimes we fall asleep after our lovemaking but I do not know the look of vulnerability and innocence of deep slumber on him.
He turns toward me and gives me a strange, awkward half-smile as he lifts his coffee mug to drain it.
"More?" he asks reaching to turn off the coffeemaker.
"No," I say. I rise and go to him eager for another kiss as though they were warm cookies on a plate and I couldn’t have enough.
The narwhal’s horn rests in two hooks on the wall above his bed. It is pale and spiraled and as long as the bed itself. I let my eyes rest on it as he lays me down and covers me up with himself. A narwhal, he told me, is a creature of the Arctic Circle. Not really a whale, more closely related to the porpoise but not that either. There is a legend he told me that sometimes, for no reason we can understand, the narwhals swim en masse to land and beach themselves, then wait to die. The people of those northernmost islands fear these times for they believe that when the narwhals die, ill fortune follows. Their crops will fail and their fishing nets come up empty. They watch the waves and when they see the long, spiraled horns spiking up through the waves headed for shore, they wade out into the icy waves—man, woman and child—carrying lighted torches to scare the narwhals back from their peculiar suicide.