The Distant Shore (Stone Trilogy) by Mariam Kobras

Author:Mariam Kobras [Kobras, Mariam]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Buddhapuss Ink LLC
Published: 2012-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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